Peter Radelfinger
Lines Fiction: in your art, you don’t limit yourself to one sole medium. On your website you list your lectures, and I experienced your talk as rich in images, and as a performance beyond the task of informing the audience.
Is presenting your thoughts through giving a speech part of your art?
Peter Radelfinger: Yes. From early on I had my doubts about my possibilities and the necessity to produce (traditional) art work. Continuous failing on my part more and more led me to ramified search movements, investigations, that by the pile brought out notes, sketches, collections of found images, and texts.
It’s always about the condition of perception, the shift of the human factor, and about political aspects in art. Various media interest me, and the question, how thinking works. On top it’s the focus on the poetical essential in life and art.
The usual form of an exhibition sets boundaries and limits all this material, and therefore through the processual character of my work I tend to rely on presentations in situ. I expand these situations towards acting and giving lectures. This should not be misunderstood as explanations of my work. The importance of the ‘musical’ side is growing. Compositions arise, elements of declaring, and pointing something out, as well as arrangements of images, texts, and animation, all spelling out that there are intervals, emptiness, breaks, and rhythm. That’s what interests me in animations, too.
Lines Fiction: you don’t develop lengthy animations, but limit your pieces to brief image changes. They have the rough-and-ready look and feel of gif-animations on a website in the early days, and they correspond with an assemblage of drawings that you present in abundance. How did this correspondence arise?
Peter Radelfinger: the rough, the banal, and the mundane always attracted me. It makes me happy that animations fuel the funny and comical aspects. These animations arise from an abundance of notes and small drawings. With my assistant Sandro Wettstein, together we choose some sheets to animate. It’s not about telling a story trough animation, more or less there should be an irritation through minimal movements. This way it pushes our ability for noticing alterations in inanimate everyday objects. It gives back the original meaning to animation.
A certain intensity should be exceeded, for the snapshots to reach our awarness. It’s about something profound: how can I breathe life into a special moment that I want to point out? Animation and the transfer of media generate a certain attraction for me, otherwise I love sticking to simple drawings and marks.